MetaViewer and MetaCommander: Applying WWW Tools to Genome Informatics

Yasuhiko Kitamura [1] (kitamura@info.eng.osaka-cu.ac.jp)
Hideyuki Nakanishi [2] (nuka@lab7.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp)
Tetsuya Nozaki [1] (noz@kdel.info.eng.osaka-cu.ac.jp)
Teruhisa Miura [2] (miura@lab7.kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp)
Toru Ishida [2] (ishida@kuis.kyoto-u.ac.jp)

[1] Department of Information and Communication Engineering,
Faculty of Engineering, Osaka City University
3-3-138 Sugimoto, Sumiyoshi-ku, Osaka 558, Japan
[2] Department of Information Science, Faculty of Engineering,
Kyoto University
Yoshida-Honmachi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto 606-01, Japan

With the advance of the Human Genome Project, a huge amount of various genome data has been stored in a number of databases and the WWW system is widely used to access these databases. From the viewpoint of information supplier, the WWW is a quite useful tool to provide various types of data easily, but from the viewpoint of information consumer, it is not good enough because of lack of rigid data format and difficulty of data access. In this paper, by extending a current WWW browser, we propose two generic WWW tools; MetaViewer and MetaCommander, and try to apply them to the genome informatics to support researchers who search, analyze, and dispatch genome data, and discuss their potential advantages from the viewpoint of information consumer.